KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
The BFE Committee and its members are delighted to announce as the keynote speakers Professor John Tomlison and Professor Timothy D. Taylor
Professor John Tomlinson
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John Tomlinson is Professor of Cultural Sociology; Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham; Head of Research for Cultural, Communications and Media Studies (RAE Unit 66); and Chair of the School Professorial Group at Nottingham Trent University. John Tomlinson is an authority on the cultural aspects of the globalization process and has lectured at many distinguished universities across Europe, the United States and East Asia as well as at venues such as The Bauhaus Institute, Dessau; Tate Britain; The Council of Europe; the Festival Filosofia, Modena and Demos, Hungary. He has worked as a consultant on issues of globalization, culture and politics to several international public sector institutions including UNESCO, The Council of Europe, The Commonwealth Secretariat, and the Geneva Centre for Security Policy and Nato Defence College. Articles, profiles and interviews on his work have been published in national newspapers such as the Asahi Shimbu, Tokyo, the Guanming Daily, Beijing, the Hufvudsbladet, Helsinki and on Finnish Television, YLE TV1 and Italian National Television and Radio (RAI). |
John Tomlinson is on the editorial advisory boards of several journals, including Theory, Culture and Society, Journal of International Communication, Global Media and Communication and the Asian Journal of International Studies. Published books include Cultural Imperialism and Globalisation and Culture, and John Tomlinson's recent work has explored the place of speed within modern telemediated culture, resulting in his latest book, The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy published by Sage Publications in October 2007. He is currently developing research into the constitution of public culture and cultural values within contemporary capitalist societies. | |
KEYNOTE ABSTRACT
Emergent Agendas of Cultural Globalization
After nearly two decades of analysis of the cultural dimensions of globalization, the overall picture remains far from clear. The early - largely speculative - scenarios of the emergence of either a unified or a uniform global culture have mostly been abandoned, as the inherent complexity of the globalization process has been more properly understood. But we seem to be left with a set of familiar, seemingly intractable, issues. These are either problems of empirical difficulty – for example the nature, extent and significance of Western cultural dominance - or of essential theoretical dispute or value incompatibility - such as the unresolved debate over the competing claims of cultural cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity.
In one way or another, these debates have all been about the contents of global cultures - be these artefacts and their symbolic meanings, beliefs, tastes, styles, values, or identities. However, if we approach culture in a different way – focussing instead upon the core dynamics of global modernity itself – some new issues and perspectives present themselves. The lecture will explore two of these emerging agendas.
The first of these is what I will call the global management of cultural diversity. Whilst it is increasingly clear that global cultural diversity is not directly threatened by an overwhelming tendency towards homogenization, we are nonetheless witnessing a deep transformation in the context in which the diversity of culture exists. The inherently modern drive towards institutional regulation, combined with the ever-rising gradient of the commodification of culture, is producing new - and sometimes perverse - ways in which cultural difference is understood, promoted and valued.
The second agenda concerns the impact of the combination of an accelerating global capitalist economy - ‘fast capitalism’ - and the ubiquity of globalizing media and communications technologies on the common texture of everyday life. The reiterated practices, protocols and routines associated with these core features of contemporary modernity are producing a new and challenging condition that I call ‘global immediacy’, which is displacing some of the founding assumptions of the earlier industrial modernity which gave rise to the globalization process. The coming of immediacy has potentially far-reaching implications for the way in which we understand future cultural production and consumption practices and the values we attach to them.
Professor Timothy D. Taylor
Timothy D. Taylor is a Professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to numerous articles on various musics, he is the author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (Routledge 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture (Routledge 2001), and Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Duke University Press 2007). His article The Commodification of Music at the Dawn of the Era of Mechanical Music, published in Ethnomusicology in 2007, was awarded the Jaap Kunst Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology for 'the most significant article in ethnomusicology written by a member of the Society for Ethnomusicology and published within the previous year'.
Timothy D. Taylor's interests include globalization, technology, race, ethnicity, consumption, tourism, and gender. He has received a fellowship from the National Humanities Center, as well as a junior fellowship and the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently editing and writing two books: The Social Life of Sound Technologies: A History in Documents, 1878-1945, co-edited with Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda (to be published by Duke University Press); and The Sounds of Capitalism: A History of Music in Advertising, from radio to the present. He is an avid performer of Irish traditional music on the flute and can be heard regularly at sessions in southern California.
KEYNOTE ABSTRACT
Globalization, Late Capitalism, and Music
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, myriad discourses sprung up that attempted to understand the present: was it postmodern, the information age, the postindustrial era, an era of late capitalism? Many influential publications adopted and fleshed out these various perspectives. “Globalization” as a way of viewing the present and recent past appeared relatively recently, yet it has come to dominate considerations of the present, both in and out of academia.
This presentation examines what is lost when late capitalism is elided in favor of “globalization.” “Globalization” as a perspective and body of theory can help us understand how musics travel, for example, but is less useful in explaining what happens once music has traveled and entered the Euro-American late capitalist music industry.
| The keynote addresses will be held on Saturday and Sunday in the Dean Walters Lecture Theatre. |
